Seal books

A Novel

The greatest weapon against a serial killer? A girl with no fear. There's been a murder. And it isn't part of some FBI training exercise. Late one night, in the middle of a rainstorm, Gaia and her roommate stumbled upon an actual killing. Since they were the only ones to glimpse the perp, headquarters has granted Gaia and Catherine temporary FBI badges to solve the case. Way to hit the ground running. But the investigation is not like a TV show. It's gruesome. It's frustrating. It's real. When the killer strikes again, they realize this isn't a one-shot deal either. Gaia tries to piece together some clues, but there's no real lead to go on. And without a profile, the next victim could be anyone. Anyone at all. When the murderer of a single mother leaves a strange clue at the scene, Gaia Moore decides to put her FBI training into action in order to track down the killer before he strikes again, yet knowing he targets single woman like herself, Gaia must be extremely cautious in her pursuit.

Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices--after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth's dead lover...and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably toward the same climax.

At the heart of Emotional Arithmetic is a memorable woman: Melanie Winters, mother and lover, middle-aged, eccentric, courageous, quirkily unpredictable - and deeply marked by her past. For behind Melanie's present life lies the terrible story of how, as a girl, she was interned at Drancy in Paris - the way-camp to Auschwitz, where she realized that her parents would never return. For two years, the friendship of an English boy, Christopher Lewis, and the protection of an older man, Jakob Bronski, helped her survive. Years later, Melanie is able to offer Bronski, now an elderly heroic Russian dissident and a veteran of a Soviet gulag, a home with her family. Christopher, meanwhile, has become a novelist, and he too reenters her life. As the two men converge, the past swiftly upsets Melanie's precarious mental balance. She must confront again the demons of her past, and the difficult balancing of guilt and love, good and evil, duty and desire.

With The Doctor's Wife, Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrote Flaubert's Madame Bovary, exploring the heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life. A woman with a secret, adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's sensation novel. The novel is also self-consciously literary, however, and Braddon attempts to transcend the sensation genre.

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Set in the prairies in the 1930s, and rich with the author's own memories of her time there as a young woman, this is a powerful story of an impressionable and passionate young teacher and the pupils, from impoverished immigrant families, whose lives she touches. Children of My Heart bears unforgettable testimony to the healing power love exerts on the wounds of loneliness and poverty.

"Eileen Hughes, twenty years old and never before out of Northern Ireland, has arrived in London for a week's holiday with Bernard and Mona McAuley, who are not only her employers but also, she believes, her friends. In Brian Moore's masterful handling, this seemingly simple story darkens and expands, exploring the nature of obsession--both spiritual and erotic--with an elegance, anarchic playfulness, and imagination that recall Henry Green or Muriel Spark."--Publisher's website.